Sebastiaan Herman MSc Software Engineering December, 2007 Rapid application development offshore A RADICAL NEW APPROACH TO GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT University of Amsterdam Paydutch Summary This thesis describes the creation and validation of “Rapid Application Development Offshore” (RADOS). RADOS aims at increasing performance in offshore development by empowering the development team by applying leadership tactics supported by the latest knowledge on Service oriented architecture. Currently the benefits in offshore software development are decreased by a significant amount of management overhead costs. Empowerment increases autonomy and thus reduces the need for management. Most approaches to offshore development focus more on the software development process and less on the people that create the software. This results often in excessive specification and process management onsite. Not only are these processes expensive, but they can also make the work of the offshore developers less interesting. Developers translate specifications into working code, with little opportunity to put their own creative thought into the design. Research in the early 90s has shown that participating leaders perform better than authorian leaders. They have a wider span of control and produce better results; productivity and innovation are significantly higher. These leaders know that a team with highly trained professionals is perfectly capable of making their own decisions and that performance can only be maximized by supporting the team in becoming self-managed. RADOS supports the offshore development team in becoming self-managed and aligned with the goals of the client company. Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a key ingredient in RADOS. SOA helps stabilizing requirements early in the development process and allows for incremental development by using small releases, manageable by teams varying from one to three developers. Using SOA, empowerment is possible in offshore development and it can increase performance. Evidence was found that the employees felt generally more responsible for their work; the developers had less problems and more and better ideas about the clients software; towards the end of the research, the developers were generally more productive; Also, developers were directly communicating with important stakeholders in large organizations like the head of ICT from TNT Benelux, the largest shipment company in the Netherlands; and with the support desk of Equens, a major payment cooperation in Europe. 2 Preface My interest in moving software development offshore came after a series of bad experiences in hiring qualified personal onsite. I had to wait for months before I could interview a new developer. The quality of their work was low; I interviewed and hired four employees; none of them had formal ICT education. And their price was very high. It occurred to me that companies in my direct environment preferred paying ten times as much for an onsite developer and waiting months before they come available. I heard complaints about the quality and communication in offshore development; assignments had to be given in extreme detail and after delivery there still was a lot of rework. I expected the offshore developers to be more motivated than my onsite colleagues, for them this must be an almost unbelievable chance. Knowing this, I started my research in getting to know the people I was dealing with; a process which became the most interesting experience of my professional life. Many people in my environment contributed to this thesis. One group of people deserve to be mentioned first. My Chinese friends showed me what I already expected; when fighting for the same cause, they can easily match and even outperform the qualities their overpaid colleagues in Europe. What struck me in particular was their capability to acquire knowledge. Little about service oriented architecture, the way of working, and the tools and materials used was known from the start, but in the end the team occurred to me as very professional. Three of the teams members made extraordinary contributions to this research. ‘Jin Bin Lu’, who rapidly proved a great help in adopting SOA; ‘Dong Hui Chen’, who managed to communicate effectively with all sorts of stakeholders directly towards the end of the research period; ‘Xiang Bin Chen’, who was responsible for the good results of the ‘Toolbox 55 project’. Based on the knowledge acquired during this research they started a company named ‘Teamwish’. I am looking forward to working with Teamwish. My special thanks go to my coach Hans Dekkers (UvA). He helped me to grow incredibly fast as a software engineer, team coach and researcher. 3 A great review was received from ‘ Bas Terwijn’, his review made a big difference to the final result. Other reviewers were: ‘Sharif Moeniralm’, ‘Marco van Gelder’, ‘Jo Janssen’ and ‘Marc Hermans’. Finally, I thank my partner Tatijana van der Veer. During the writing of this thesis I was so busy that the time invested in my role as a partner decreased to almost zero. I admire the way she unselfishly helped me through this process by taking up many of my responsibilities. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................................. 5 1. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................... 7 1.1. PROBLEM DEFINITION .........................................................................................................................8 1.2. POWER TO THE DEVELOPERS...............................................................................................................8 1.3. CURRENT APPROACHES ...................................................................................................................10 2. CONTEXT....................................................................................................................................... 11 2.1. BACKGROUND VENDOR COMPANY .................................................................................................11 2.2. BACKGROUND CLIENT COMPANY.....................................................................................................11 3. EMPOWERMENT ............................................................................................................................ 13 3.1. THE COGNITIVE MODEL OF EMPOWERMENT .......................................................................................13 3.2. CONTROL SYSTEMS..........................................................................................................................15 4. SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE............................................................................................. 17 4.1. THE SOA LAYERED VIEW ..................................................................................................................17 4.2. SPANNING APPLICATION..................................................................................................................19 5. RESEARCH APPROACH ................................................................................................................ 20 5.1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADOS........................................................................................................20 5.2. VALIDATION....................................................................................................................................20 6. DEVELOPMENT OF THE METHOD.................................................................................................. 24 6.1. INITIATION .......................................................................................................................................24 6.2. LEADERSHIP.....................................................................................................................................25 6.3. SELF MANAGEMENT .........................................................................................................................26 7. RADOS........................................................................................................................................... 28 7.1. WORKING PROCESS ........................................................................................................................28 7.2. WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENT ............................................................................................................31 7.3. COACHING....................................................................................................................................36 7.4. APPLICATION OF THE CONTROL SYSTEMS OF EMPOWERMENT ..............................................................37 8. MEASUREMENT.............................................................................................................................. 39 8.1. INSTANT MESSENGER STATISTICAL ANALYSIS ........................................................................................40 8.2. INSTANT MESSENGER EXCERPTS .........................................................................................................41 5 8.3. RELEASE COMPARISON ....................................................................................................................43 8.4. TICKET SYSTEM BACKLOG .................................................................................................................44